"An ecological metacommunity is a set of interacting communities which are linked by the dispersal of multiple, potentially interacting species. The term is derived from the field of community ecology, which is primarily concerned with patterns of species distribution, abundance and interactions." I think the concept fits well with phytoplankton and periphyton in freshwater communities but I want more opinions about it.
This have more to do with biodiversity, I am not thinking about populations, because populations are composed of only one species. A metacommunity can be defined broadly as “a set of ecological communities at different sites (potentially but not necessarily linked by dispersal), whereas a community is a group of species at a given site (Leibold and Mikkelson 2002).
Why this concept is used, because the species that you found in a site is not coming from nowhere, is coming from the metacommunity, so what is the importance of metacommunity migration, with respect to other process: fragmentation, local habitat, competition, this would tell us how the community is assembled, which are the most important processes.
Here is a very interesting page with tool for metacommunity analysis:
http://hydrodictyon.eeb.uconn.edu/people/willig/Research/metacommunity%20page.html
Ref:
Leibold, M.A. and G.M. Mikkelson. 2002 Coherence, species turnover, and boundary clumping: elements of meta-community structure. Oikos 97:237-250.
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